Collaboration and communication are at the center of today's enterprise, but unlocking maximum results requires more than simply deploying the right tech tools.

By Samuel Greengard

As the digital age unfolds, it's increasingly clear that communication and collaboration are at the center of organizational success. The ability of employees, business partners and customers to interact across technologies and channels increasingly determines whether an enterprise flourishes or flounders.

"The dynamics of business are undergoing significant change," observes David Nichols, IT Transformation Leader for the Americas at consulting firm Ernst & Young.

To be sure, building an organization that fully connects to communication and collaboration tools is paramount. Not only must organizations select technologies and systems that enable real-time interaction—often among multiple groups of employees and spanning numerous devices—business and IT executives must revamp business processes and workflows to reflect a changing environment.

As Mary Hamilton, managing director of Accenture Technology Labs, puts it: "The environment is changing from simply enabling communication and collaboration to embedding it into the enterprise."

"Many organizations have already rolled out communication and collaboration capabilities, and there's recognition that these tools are extremely important in today's business environment," Hamilton says. "But understanding the business drivers, identifying the key stakeholders and actually changing the way people work is a significant challenge. Moving from initial excitement to widespread adoption and use takes time and effort."

A growing array of channels is creating new challenges and opportunities. Over the last decade, unified communication has matured, instant messaging and chat have gone mainstream, social media has exploded in popularity, and video conferencing has become as simple as clicking a button on a computer or mobile device. Most organizations now depend on these tools in one form or another, but the key is determining how they're used in combination, and how employees and others tap into them.

Saideep Raj, global managing director of Accenture Technology, believes that communication and collaboration have evolved from a more passive way to interact with mission-critical tools. "The availability of everyone, everywhere changes the equation in a profound way," he says. "It is embedding point-to-point real-time communication in the enterprise."

But along with all the potential comes a need to create "top-down governance around these capabilities and how people use them," Raj adds. This is especially true as bring your own device (BYOD) and the consumerization of IT ripple through the enterprise communication space.

Leveraging Expertise

Effective collaboration has emerged at the center of business and IT for LeasePlan, an Almere, Netherlands company that leases more than 1.3 million vehicles in 31 countries, including the United States. The 50-year-old firm has more than 6,000 employees scatted around the world and offers banking and other services.

"In the past, it was extremely difficult for employees to find relevant information and exchange knowledge," explains Wim De Gier, senior global project manager for LeasePlan. "We knew that we had to find a way to stop reinventing the wheel and benefit from the expertise that already existed."

The firm needed to connect experts and gurus across internal divisions, departments and countries. "We wanted to ensure that knowledge could be spread across all groups," De Gier says. The list included contracts and documents, project management teams, and areas of financial, legal and other expertise.

A previous Lotus Notes Domino directory provided only part of the firepower needed. So, LeasePlan turned to IBM's social technologies for workplace collaboration. It started with a pilot program in 2009. Two years later, the company rolled out robust collaboration tools across the enterprise.